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Germany's ruling coalition has used it majority in the Bundestag to vote in a new addendum to the German copyright law which could require news aggregators to pay publishing houses for using their free content.

"In light of this development, and in light of the legal uncertainty that comes from the law, we have introduced a new confirmation system," Gerrit Rabenstein, strategic partner development manager at Google Germany, wrote on the Google Germany product blog.

Publishers that want to stay on Google News or opt out can let the search giant know using the confirmation system.

Outside of Germany, Google will continue to use the opt-out system, whereby publishers will have to take steps — such as using a robot.txt file or metadata to let Google's crawlers know what to ignore — to make sure their content isn't indexed by search giant's news aggregator.

"We are convinced that we support publishing best when we transfer millions of readers to their sites by making their content more visible and easier to find," Rabenstein said.